Respectfully Reconsidering Williams

Books

January 5, 1986|By Roger Hurlbert, Book Editor

The play`s the thing when you`re talking about Tennessee Williams. Always was, always will be.

But lately his prose fiction has come in for respectful reconsideration. The new interest stems primarily from the publication of Williams` Collected Stories by New Directions ($19.95). If nothing else, the 574-page volume is a monument to the writer`s fecundity and determination. In his introduction, Gore Vidal notes Williams` obsessive work habits and reckons that many of the 49 stories in the book ``were rewritten a dozen or more times, often over as many years.``

Vidal recalls a time in the `40s when Williams invited (or rather, challenged) him to ``fix`` one of his short stories.

``So I reversed backward-running sentences, removed repetitions, simplified the often ponderous images,`` Vidal writes. ``I was rather proud of the result. He was deeply irritated. `What you have done is remove my style, which is all that I have.` He was right.``

True, Collected Stories is overstocked with needless repetitions, frequently announced with phrases such as ``I have already suggested`` or ``As I have said . . . `` Numerous sentences could stand fixing: ``That nervous block described in the beginning was now so throughly dissolved by virtue of the effortless association with Amada, that his libido had now begun to ask for an extended field of play.``

Ponderous images abound: ``The storm that hovered uncertainly on the horizon was now plunging toward them. Not continually but in sudden thrusts and withdrawals, like a giant bird lunging up and down on its terrestrial quarry, a bird with immense white wings and beak of godlike fury . . . But the giant white bird did not know where it was striking. Its beak of fury was blind, or perhaps the beak -- `` Mercifully, Williams interrupts himself in midsentence.

It`s not the technique, however, but the individuality that makes his prose eminently worth reading. Williams brought to the short story what Vidal calls ``a narrative tone of voice that is totally compelling.`` As you read these stories, you can almost hear Williams telling them in that syrupy Southern speech of his.

By his interpolations and digressions you shall know him. From ``Rubio y Morena``: ``You may be wondering why you are presented with these unpleasant clinical details in advance of the story.`` From ``The Yellow Bird``: ``Now from this point on the story takes a strange turn that may be highly disagreeable to some readers, if any still hoped it was going to avoid the fantastic.`` From ``The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin``: ``No, I am not putting all of these things in their exact chronological order, I may as well confess it, but if I did I would violate my honor as a teller of stories . . . ``

Sometimes the storyteller`s honor impels him to acknowledge the ponderousness of his imagery, as in this instance from ``The Knightly Quest``: ``That`s what Braden always called for when he and Violet had chalked up one more vigorous assault on the huge and dark siege of inertia that can be said to hang about the dynamics of existence -- to put it in a somewhat or more than somewhat rhetorical fashion.``

More often than not, the stories are told in the first person by one who reveals himself as a professional writer. But even when Williams adopts the third person, the first has a way of creeping in. ``The Knightly Quest,`` the longest story in this collection, proceeds in the third person for 34 pages until Williams breaks down and permits himself one ``But as I said already . . . ``

Vidal maintains that these stories, arranged in chronological order, represent ``the true memoir of Tennessee Williams`` -- truer, at least, than his lubricious, chaotic Memoirs of 1975. In Vidal`s view, Collected Stories demonstrates that Williams spent an entire career ``playing with the same vivid, ambiguous cards that life dealt him.``

Certainly Collected Stories rewards study from this standpoint. For example, it is intriguing to observe the differences in detail between ``The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,`` the apparently non-fictional reminiscence that serves as the book`s preface, and ``Grand``, a short story based in part on the same family memories. (For an extra touch of poignancy, Williams moved a key moment from November to the week before Christmas.)

Certain autobiographical elements -- those ``vivid, ambiguous cards`` -- turn up in story after story: the lonely little boy whose only friend is a little girl; the sensitive, fragile, ill-fated sister; the alcoholic salesman-father; the young writer, underemployed at the shoe company; the young writer, down and nearly out in New Orleans; the beautiful beloved dying young.